resembling summer

 

15th July

Another fantastic Monday! When I say fantastic I mean it wasn't raining and I wasn't working. Look, nobody loves a complaining bore so I'll try and find other ways of shaming this summer into behaving. What's left of it. Anyway I didn't have any work getting me down so I caught the train to Longniddry (again) and headed East. Breaking with tradition I committed to the macro lens all day (at the risk of missing owls and marsh harriers over Aberlday) and left the camera in my back pack for the first 3 miles. Those I jogged at about 12minute miling which for some would be a death sentence, others (my past self included) ridiculously leisurely. For the record I was very moist by Aberlady and it did not feel leisurely.

meadow brown

I bought a Ham Hock Ploughman's s/wich and this time I'd filled my reservoir. I tipped a small bottle of cold fizzy into this and along with the 1.25lts of watery juice (and tray of ice cubes) I'd filled it with earlier, made a decent cool drink that lasted all day. I chose Postman's Walk for a change as I'd gone along the front road last couple of times. There was nothing there (except neck high grass and thistles) including no early 2nd brood Holly Blues. 

gvw

square headed wasp, Crabroninae, 

on the info board other side of the wooden bridge

blow fly, Protocalliphora, also on info board

DGF

Right from the off there was quite a bit of butterfly activity. Plenty common blues although not many were as obliging as the photos here suggest. Same with fritillaries. Lots about but most too busy for an interview. The macro lens forces me to get a bit closer than with the long zoom. Generally this means getting down and crawling forward. If you think about the line of sight a butterfly has, anything tall (above the grassy horizon) and looming, bearing down, appears far more aggressive than something approaching at a lower level. This may be highly incovenient but produces better results. I try to consider the positives while scrabbling about, kneeling on thistles, one hand in the nettles and crawling through sharp grass. That the blue areas in Japan (places notable for extremely long-lived occupants) are partly on account of the locals practising a lifestyle that involves getting down on the floor and getting up multiple times a day as part of a worshipping ceremony, if memory serves. I'm having trouble google-confirming that! It seems a lot of the blue zone stuff in Okinawa is down to diet, community and coastline lifestyle. I think it also helps to live on a steep landscape where you are doing plenty hill reps.

Closer to home, Michael Mosely was a big fan of practical things to prolong a healthy lifestyle and promoted healthy eating and staying strong enough to get up out of a chair. This sounds trivial but often getting up out a chair without help (and up and down stairs) are the things that allow you to stay in your own home and not be trundled off to an obligatory old folkery. By the time this becomes acute it is too late to do anything about it and you have to start NOW if you are not already working on it. I say this to my contemporaries, ie those in their 50s, 60s and beyond. Use it or lose it. Get up, stay on the scene, like a sex machine. Or maybe more like a Stannah stairlift.

It was heartbreaking the way Michael Mosely never got to live out the long life he was working towards, and that his tragic end robbed us of this charming person. I rarely give a hoot about rock stars and celebs dying (ones I haven't personally known, which is all of them) and can't relate to people getting teary eyed about Prince say or Princess Diana etc. But I did feel Michael Mosely's untimely demise was really upsetting, and obviously harrowing for his family. He did seem such a worthwhile and genuine man, selling moderation, in an age when far too many are selling excess, decadence, greed, material wealth and live-fat-die-young stupidity.

obliging common blue

loads of small skippers about

the macro lens is amazing for close up details

Another quite agreeable common blue. Apart from not opening his pretty blue wings this chap was happy to sit on his perch while I slid forward like a large, well-fed snake through the grass. An older couple I'd passed earlier stopped to watch the entertainment. I wonder if they thought I'd had a nasty fall, although they were birders/butterfliers themselves and let me know they recognised the arrangement as that of a fellow enthusiast. I gushed about the willingness of the subject and although they had a look neither felt the need to get down and stay on the scene.

We covered the next hundred yards as a small group chatting about the lack of butterflies this year and how it was all going to hell although seemed perhaps in recovery. I had initially gone past them thinking I didn't want to be held up chatting to a couple of older individuals but in fact they ended up leaving me behind as I got distracted by a few of the insects in the long grasses. 

Megachile sp?

This (above) might be a woodcarving leaf-cutter bee (well make up your mind!) One website said it is one of a suite of 8 superficially similar species. Frankly it is above my paygrade to investigate this further. Wikipedia with no apparent irony states the genus Megachile is a cosmopolitan group of solitary bees. Apparently in biogeography (two different classes where I grew up) a cosmopolitan distribution is the range of a taxon that extends across most or all of the earth. Now you know. 

meadow broon
loads of these and also ringlets, I just don't bother with them mostly

my new friends, heading towards the dunes

While my pensioner pals went seaward toward the dunes I took a left turn towards the estuary. It was a very good call as there was a butterfly-rich corner just beyond the junction. It was a pleasant looking handkerchief of slightly denser ground covering flowers and my butterfly radar was flashing red and flutter-sirens were quietly going off internally. I left the path and waded into the shin deep vegetation to see if anything stirred. 

a decent showing of cinnabar caterpillars and soldier beetles

Initially it was a little frustrating as there were a couple of DGFs lurking there. However when you got close (and they were invisible up to this point) they flew up and away and didn't land anywhere near. It is like coming across a £20 note on the beach but as you bend over it blows well out to sea. Despite opening my eyes as wide as they could go I'd rarely see the next thing until it got up and flew away. A small heath can usually be followed until it lands, but more often than not they refuse to land anywhere as scenic as the flower they just left. The exception is below although it was not handed to me on a plate without quite a long and boring runaround. And even then it flew off again before I crawled forward for the close up.

small heath on meadowsweet

common blue female

The exception was this excellent common blue. The males are pretty much all the same. The females are considerably more individual and vary from almost entirely brown uppers (with orange+black lunules round the edge) to almost entirely blue like the males. This variety and the fact they tend to stay more hidden in the long grasses than their male counterparts, makes them far more desirable.

So I was delighted to find several today starting with this one which I approached with maximum caution. Although it changed venues a couple of times it was so vibrant it wasn't too hard to follow as it flew and I was able to get in really close at times and capitalise on the macro stuff. It was so well behaved I even took a couple of handheld stacked shots, resting the camera on my knee or wedging an elbow on the ground, while holding my breath and shooting off 5 or more continuous shots. Could have done with a touch more sunshine but it was bright enough I didn't require the flash. 

Sometimes you get lucky with the subject sitting on a great perch well above the surrounding junk and jungle. Other times you risk doing a little gardening - removing of stems that cut across the centre of the frame in front of the insect. In the next couple of shots I removed the offending matter in post. When I process my photos I tend to crop them and sometimes change the saturation or contrast. Mostly just small tweaks that don't change that much of the content. I don't shoot raw because life is too short to convince bad photos they want to be good photos and I don't have enough hard drive space for raw files. (I just recently bought a 4TB external drive as I'd filled the last (2TB) one, which lasted 5 years. I suspect I will horse through the next one quicker as every photo is larger than the previous camera produced. Videos are really large and have to be processed/edited before they can be posted anywhere online.) Occasionally if a photo is worth it I'll spend a while in photoshop changing a part that detracts from the subject, it is rarely the subject itself that gets tweaked as that is something I attend to at the point the photo is taken. Just so you can enjoy the behind the scenes action I have left the befores to compare to the afters. This is only done on photos that I feel are worth it and most are not.

Above: I enjoyed the way the butterfly is in focus and most of the background is not. However the distracting white stem coming in from the top needed to be removed, as did the one coming in from the bottom right corner. Without doing too much to change it I also tried to soften the impact of the brown wrinklies it is sitting on. 

That was a couple of minutes work. More involving was sorting the photo below. I wanted to disappear or reduce the impact of three elements; the yellow stem at the top, the reed bottom right and the really annoying reed in front of the flower. It took about half and hour and is the closest I get to painting these days. It is a very similar process as you have to know what you want and invent the missing bits without drawing attention to them more than the original problem. I was happy with the end result and pretty sure if I wasn't demonstrating it here, nobody would be any the wiser. I believe you can now use A.I. to do this sort of work. I quite enjoy doing it by hand, as I said it is the closest I get to painting pictures. It makes you look very closely at how things are, and how we see them, which is a lot of what (non-abstract) painting is.

I had seen this blue on the ragged robin earlier but not got near for a photo. I was really hoping it would return and tried to get it to return by focussing on mind control and silently please-please-pleasing it to return. I was totally stoked when it did as the colours really go well together. The photo was just slightly spoiled by some of the surrounding vegetation. This was cloned out using photoshop.

common blue on ragged robin - a work of art?!

dark green fritillary
worst name for a butterfly ever!

aphids!

eleven-spotted ladybird

a slight haze hung around the Forth most of the day

it is really unusual to find a fish on the beach
you wouldn't think it, but it is!

Aberlady beach.

Clare coming out after a dip

common blue

fresh small skipper

beach accessories

mating meadow browns and cantharid beetles, and a small skip

Good to see Burnet Moths (6 spotters in this case) back again. For a while they were mssing in action and I worried they had all been drowned while sleeping in their hammocks, pupating. Some made it through these desperate months and have appeared doing their fabulously coloured lives along the coastal grasslands. With fewer about they are flying much more than in previous years where they collected in huddles of their own kind. Just for sport I have been trying to get in-flight photos as they are slower than DGFs and skippers and leisurely saunter around flowers.

meadow brown

I guessing someone dropped their lip gloss
and someone else found it and put it on this post next to the car park

After a quick hello to Hazel at the ice cream van I went along the back of the dunes and came across this Red Admiral which was pretty flighty and a reluctant model. Happy to get a pic as they look fab against the buckthorn background and it was I think the only RA of the day.

this is all these cantharids ever do

still more blues

a couple of short video clips taken today
common blue (f) and sedge warbler beatboxing (vol. up)

that bong is still where we last saw it

female above,
male, smaller and below

One of the highlights of the day was this pair of mating DGFs. I saw them from a distance although they were quite well hidden off the beaten path. I was super stealthy in case they flew off but they held still for long enough. I reckoned this was one lucky male as I also saw dozens more out chasing about, looking for females.

good condition samll skipper

not all the DGFs were in such good nick; a few will have been out
for 3~4 weeks and there has been no shortage of bad weather during

a favourite spot for lunch and shoe emptying

I couldn't believe how hot my feet were when I took my shoes off!

washed out or abberation?

All along the grasslands before Archerfields/Eyebroughy beach there were DGFs. Most would be males looking for females. I can't remember seeing them out in greater numbers which is reassuring in these dark days of terrible weather and low numbers. Most of them were too busy to stop and chat.

I always have high hopes for the Chinese Privet bush near the propeller cone but this year yet again it has been a disappointment. There was the occasional passing DGF but they were not nectaring there as they did a few years ago. Only thing there today, a 6 spot burnet. I was glad I had at least met a mating pair earlier. 

Fidra

And that was about that. I decided to concentrate on running the last 3 miles as usually there is little in the way of wildlife to point the camera at. I was going to put the camera away and focus on the running but I knew if I did that all sorts of unrepeatable stuff would appear and I'd regret it. So I ran holding it. Happy to report the last 3 miles were done at an average nearer 10minute miling than 12. Which is I think all the aches getting ironed out on the walk allowing me to jog the last few that bit quicker. It felt good and I had to pick the pace up only just making the 4.20-something train by a small margin. 

As I sat recovering a very small beetle landed on my table. It may well have fallen out my hair. Most likely did. Or it could have flown in the carriage door. It was fairly lively and walked about the place. Occasionally doing a ping with those hopper like sprung back legs. What better way to pass the train journey? I got out the flash and diffuser and took 60 shots of it as it scampered about. It wasn't very easy as the train was moving about, as was this Cabbage Stem Flea Beetle, Psylliodes-chrysocephala, which is something of a mouthful. A fun end to an excellent day out.

about 4mm end to end

14.75miles, 6hrs19mins